Day One in Resolve - Tips For Beginners (What I'd Focus on First!)

hey everybody casey ferris here i make videos on davinci resolve here on youtube today we're talking about your very first day in davinci resolve like if you just picked this up if you just opened resolve what should you do first to actually learn it and get used to it so here are the main basic concepts i would really focus on day one of davinci resolve this is what i would tell myself if i went back in time this is actually going to be a series of a few different videos which will go into some of the other pages as well so this is exciting all right so concept number one is that resolve is built in pages so down here in this lower part of the bar this is like the very first thing you need to know these buttons switch out the layout of resolve and each one of these buttons is made to do a specific thing in post-production and they kind of flow from left to right starting with media this is the media page where you will import and organize media add metadata do all kinds of fancy things with just kind of getting organized the edit and cut pages are all about laying out your story inside of a timeline as well as adding some audio some effects it's really kind of the hub of your project fusion is all about doing really fancy things fusion is a compositor and what that means is that you do things that you would normally use like something like photoshop for where you're putting two different images together maybe you're adding effects like muzzle flashes or explosions or fog or making somebody's eyes glow all of that stuff happens in fusion we have the color page this is where you do color correction and there's a ton of different tools to help you make the colors look as awesome as they can possibly be fairlight is all about audio so this is a full audio editor where you can do sound design you can mix you can add music and all of the things that you need to do and finally the deliver page is where you actually export your media and make it into a movie that somebody can actually see so wrapping your head around that is pretty much your first job if that makes sense so far then you can kind of decide which pages that you really want to jump into first which brings me to my next tip i would tell myself on day one spend some major time in the edit page the edit page like i said is the hub of resolve so get used to how this works get used to all of the different panels and where they live click every button and kind of just mess around with it the more that you understand about the edit page the more you're going to understand about just how resolve works in general so now that we have those kind of two ideas down the next thing i would do is import literally any kind of media and start to play with it how you import and resolve is you just find your footage on your hard drive and just drag it into this left section here on the edit page that's called the media pool if you get something that pops up like this just say change it won't matter for what we're doing right now and you'll have your media here in the media pool the media pool is where all of the media for your project lives and it actually lives on a bunch of different pages it's in the media page of course as well as the cut page the edit page the color page the fusion page the fairlight page it's everywhere so yeah import some of your media double click on it and open it up in this viewer here this is kind of your preview anytime you double click on something it shows up here this is just a bunch of shots of me and my kids going biking in the forest pretty fun and quick tip if you want to just use part of a piece of media you can set an in and out you can either do that by using these two little buttons here or you can type i and o on the keyboard so i for n that's the start of the clip and o for out that's the end of the clip and now that i have something that i want to actually add to my story add to my timeline i can just grab this picture and bring it down here to the timeline this is where we're actually going to lay out our story so so literally just find any kind of clip it doesn't matter at all just practice grabbing part of it within and out and then dragging it down here to the timeline and you can kind of build your story that way once you have clips down here in the timeline a couple things have happened one there's a new timeline little icon here in the media page and two there's stuff showing up here on the right-hand viewer which is called the timeline viewer this is what people who watch your movie are actually going to see so you can play this back and make sure everything is beautiful and again get used to doing that the other thing that you can do is when things are in the timeline you can grab the edge like this and trim things and so you can cut parts out make things shorter you can grab this blade tool right here and cut this clip in half and switch back and really it's a matter of playing around with all of these little clips until you're familiar with you know if you want to do something like oh i want this to be shorter you know exactly what to do you grab the edge of it and trim it so that it's shorter i cannot stress enough how important it is to actually do this before you get into any of the fancy things in resolve make sure you have a good idea of how the basic editing works how things work in the timeline if you want to do something like add some text poke around and see how resolve kind of handles things like that here's a little spoiler alert in the upper left hand corner there's a button called effects library if you click that that opens up a panel here and under titles you can grab text like this and you just grab it and drag it into the timeline and that's how you apply any kind of generator like these titles or actual generators color bars that kind of stuff and that's also how you would add an effect like a blur or even something like binoculars like this so we can just grab this and drag it on top of one of our clips and now we have this kind of binoculars look so mess with the edit page another huge concept that you really need to know day one is that if you select something you adjust its properties in the inspector when you click on a clip here in the upper right hand corner there's this button called inspector and if you click that that will open up this panel the controls in this panel switch out depending on what you have selected so if i have this clip selected and i were to zoom this in it zooms in that clip same thing for the text if i grab the text i can actually change what the text says and that shows up here this is something that is really important for the edit page for doing basic stuff like this but that even happens in places like fusion and fairlight basically anything that you have selected you pretty much adjust in the inspector the next thing that i would do from the ground up learning resolve day one is try to render something out no matter how good of a job you do here in the timeline people aren't ever going to watch this until you render this out as a movie you can't send somebody the davinci resolve file unless they have davinci resolve and then it's just i don't know it's kind of a weird thing to do so if you want to upload this to youtube or something you're going to have to render it so day one if you're just learning what i would do is when you're done with your project go up to the file menu and go down to quick export what that will do is give you some really basic settings so that you can actually render this out and people can see it if you're rendering to youtube you can just click youtube if it's vimeo hit vimeo other than that probably just hit h.264 and click export this will ask you where to put it of course you should not name it anything and put it on your desktop no i'm just kidding don't do that name it something reasonable and put it somewhere reasonable but then hit save and it will render this out so people can see it again very first day just do this render something out so that you can watch it so that you can show it to your friends don't worry about all the fancy export settings because there are quite a few and that's really my advice for the very first day in resolve i would definitely stick to the edit page and grab any kind of media it doesn't matter if it's pretty it doesn't matter if there's a story and drag something to the timeline that you can trim chop up and work with and do that a few times until you're just bored of doing this then if you have a camera what i would do is go out and shoot with the camera and bring it here into resolve and try to make a story and just render it out with a quick export don't worry about doing all the fancy things if you're really trying to learn resolve this is the foundation the more you play with this the more you're gonna have a really solid foundation for actually learning resolve that's pretty exciting don't you think here's a pretty funny part where my son kind of falls over and don't worry we've laughed at this many of time ah children i hope you have a beneficial day

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 18,170

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, resolve 17 tutorial, how to use resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 for beginners, How I wish I started, beginner tutorial, beginner tutorial for davinci resolve 17, Casey Faris, blackmagic, how to use davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve free, davinci resolve tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve 17 tutorial for beginners, how to basic, how to use davinci resolve, learn video editing for beginners

Id: owyHY70K7kc

Length: 8min 38sec (518 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021